The Significant Role of French Organizations for the Blind in Promoting and Utilizing Accessible Books

I am Fernando Pinto Da Silva. I am blind. I'm married, my wife is blind too and we have a little girl who doesn’t have any vision problems. Obviously, we’re able to organize our daily lives so we are able to assist her with a certain number of things, notably access to reading and learning. To get to work, like many people who live in the Paris region, I use the metro. The biggest difference for a blind person, ultimately, it is to know most of the connections. We’re not able to follow the signs which are displayed in the metro. So we know a certain number of routes, often by heart. I am an expert in digital usage. I work for the Federation for Blind People in France. They are the ones in the region, in France, who have to come together to promote the voice of blind people in France. So here we are in front of the Pantheon, the place where the nation recognizes the importance of people who are buried here, who have had their ashes transferred here. Louis Braille, the brilliant inventor of the braille alphabet that many blind people use throughout the world. Well, Louis Braille is here. So in France, we estimate that there are almost 2 million people who are either blind or have low vision. And it is roughly estimated that in the world, there are almost 250 million people. Not having access to books means automatically closing off a certain number of doors to us. What do I mean by this, access to books? Well it can be simply to produce digital versions of these books. To access books when you are blind, notably also means being able to have it in a Braille version. And since the 1980s, there has been the possibility of having braille in digital format. The way it works is that we have under our fingers points that will go up, and then descend back into the device that we connect with and that allows us to simply read the files that we have uploaded. They say that in France, nearly one in two blind people of working age does not have a job, but among the percentage of people working and who are blind, an estimated 80% of them use Braille. And having access to all of this today, we are very lucky to have the Treaty of Marrakesh which was signed in 2013, and which allows us today, to be able to produce these accessible formats on different platforms. Before, we couldn’t just obtain these accessible formats without having to ask first, without needing a whole bunch of permissions that were very, very, very complicated to obtain. We owe our thanks to the Marrakesh Treaty. But in practice, obviously, that begs the question how to access these documents. The World Intellectual Property Organization through its service, the Accessible Books Consortium (ABC), has established a a platform allowing for cross border exchange that makes a whole bunch of catalogues available which are being shared on a single platform. I am Marc Aufrant I have been blind since birth. I worked at the National Statistics Agency in France until my retirement. And now I'm a volunteer to the Association Valentin Haüy and I take care of the international services for the Association. Here we are in the first braille library of France, which was founded in 1886 I suffered a lot from the shortage of books. And to get to where I am, I had to work two or three times more than the others and I was very jealous of my classmates who had a printout in front of them. I had to have the same material recorded, then after listening to it again and again, I would transcribe it into braille by hand. It took an enormous amount of time. That's why I am very, very responsive to developing a library of accessible books. Today it is the ABC (Accessible Books Consortium) which manages the agreement to exchange books internationally. There are approximately one million accessible books which are catalogued. There are 80 languages and in French, it is on the order of 115,000 works listed by the ABC. Today, the Association Valentin Haüy has 72,000 works registered in digital formats. And from those, 40 percent come to us from the ABC. The ABC has a large majority of its works in audio, but it can also transmit, digital braille book files. And so finally we have two services provided by the ABC. The first allows organizations to exchange with each other a number of collections. And the second is to allow myself, as an individual, to access this platform, which lets me, very quickly, to consult this catalogue and finally download a title that I am looking for. Before now, we’ve never had so many technological possibilities. Additionally, starting on June 28, 2025, all publishers of the 27 member countries of the European Union are required to publish their titles born accessible for the blind. All of this means we no longer have to fight like we once had to do, and that finally we can obtain a book. For me, that’s what I dream of: for people who are blind and visually impaired who are currently being born is that they don't have to fight like we had to do to access our school textbooks for doing schoolwork, for when you are a parent, to have books that are accessible to children who are blind and visually impaired. But that all of this is finally already there, that we no longer need to think about it.